SNIP (Small-geography Neighborhood Indicator Performance) Score Methodology

This document describes the methodology for creation of NNIP's SNIP (Small-geography Neighborhood Indicator Performance)  Score.

Background:  NNIP partners share beliefs that the places where people live affect their health, security, education, and economic success. And that we can only make progress if we understand how these issues intersect and vary across neighborhoods and among different groups of people. The network sees neighborhood-level data as a critical tool to help people identify strengths; uncover problems; and change policies, programs, and investments to better meet the needs of all residents. To assess how well the network is doing to assemble, transform, and maintain neighborhood-level data and to encourage partners to continue and expand on the hard work of obtaining and maintain data across topics, we developed a score called the SNIP (Small-geography Neighborhood Indicator Performance). The SNIP creates a standardized scale to compare across partners and places where ease of access to different sources of data may vary considerably. It is updated annually to allow the network to see trends overtime. The SNIP is designed to consider whether the data are a) neighborhood-level, b) across topics, and c) recurrently updated.